Beauty for Ashes (7 page)

Stand up! Out of the crush of the cold! He looked at Bell Rock, glad his teacher didn't know how poor the cinching job was.

He thought, bit his lip, ducked down again, and pulled the cinch tighter. The worst thing he could do, the first time on this horse, was to step in the stirrup and pull the saddle underneath her belly.

He gripped the saddle horn, stirruped the foot, and swung onto her back.

The mare stood still.

Maybe she rolled her eyes at Blue Horse, standing in front of her muzzle holding the reins. But she didn't buck. Couldn't, actually. He felt her quiver. He grinned madly. She was overloaded. The cold pummeling her senses. A man invading her back. And the deep water keeping her from doing what every instinct screamed for—to buck this man off.

He sat there, triumphant. He looked at the Wind River Mountains on the southwest, their snowy summits remote against a crystalline sky. He looked at the crazy jumble of red hills on the northeast, footstools of the Absaroka Mountains, strange, barren mazes. He grinned at Blue Horse, then at Bell Rock.

He swung down. The cold made his bones holler at him. He stepped around to the mare's muzzle, looked her in the eye. He put a hand on the muzzle.

For the first time she didn't throw her head.

“Trade breath with her,” Bell Rock said.

Sam looked up at him.

“Bend down, nose to nose. Let your breath go into her nostrils. Let her breath come into yours.”

He did. Warm breath, warm muzzle—it was almost like kissing. He forced himself not to laugh. He looked into the mare's eyes.
Do we understand each other better, the breath and spirit of you in me, the breath and spirit of me in you?

A memory seared him. The first night he dreamed of melding with the buffalo, the buffalo melding with him. One creature. “Samalo,” he murmured then.

He stood back. Once more, now confident, he stirruped the foot and swung up. She quivered less this time. Once more he surveyed the world from horseback. Then he swung down and waded fast out of the water.

His lungs quit squeezing against the cold. He breathed normally for the first time in long minutes. “Enough,” he said to Blue Horse, and his friend brought the mare up.

Coy ran up and jumped on him until Sam petted the pup.

Getting on was achievement enough for Sam this morning. He would give her sweet cottonwood bark now, a thank-you.

“Let's go get warm, Coy. Let's stand by the fire.” He wanted to fill both their bellies with meat and the hot liquid it floated in.

 

“Y
OU CONDUCT THE
sweat lodge ceremony?” Sam asked Bell Rock. They sat behind the center fire of Sam's lodge, dipping meat from the pot. It was their custom, the three of them, to lunch together after the morning's training session.

“Yes.”

“What does it do?”

Bell Rock looked away and slowly put out some words. “The sweat lodge is the womb, our mother. We go inside and invite the powers to come, the four directions, Mother Earth, Father Sky…. Whoever is in the lodge with me, he maybe asks them for something. He asks for help for his family and his people, that they have good lives. If someone's sick, he asks for healing. He's uncertain, he asks what to do. He has a problem, he asks for guidance. If he's a young man, he asks for a vision, then he goes on the mountain and looks for it.”

Bell Rock looked into the pot for a moment, like he saw something other than meat in its rich juices.

Sam blurted out, “I had a dream. Will you help me understand it?”

Bell Rock said gently, “You ask me? Why not ask other beaver men?”

Sam felt like his tongue was lashed to a post. He stammered three or four times before he got out any words. “Hannibal McKye. My friend. Six months ago on the banks of the Missouri River. I told Hannibal my dream of…this buffalo.” He started to say something about the mystic buffalo, but some sense said
no—keep it for the sweat lodge
.

“Hannibal's the only person I ever told. Hannibal said, ‘Do a sweat lodge, tell a medicine man.'”

Sam looked at Bell Rock and Blue Horse. He reached for Coy and slid the pup onto his lap.

“Tell me more.”

Now Sam must descend into a morass, or was it ascending into realms of fantasy? The Missouri River was within Bell Rock's ken, but Dartmouth College, a school founded in New England to teach Indians? Latin and Greek?

He blundered forward. “Hannibal McKye is an important man in my life. He's the son—it's hard even for me to believe it—of a man who teaches languages at a school for Indians, that man and one of his students, a Delaware woman. Delawares are Indians who live a hundred sleeps away, near the water-everywhere to the east. Hannibal reads a lot of languages, but he hunts and tracks and wears hides like any Indian. He
is
an Indian. And a white man, all at once. I met him by accident, it was like he was an angel.” On top of what must already mystify Bell Rock, “angel” wouldn't do. “A spirit messenger.” Sam spread his hands in futility. “He said, ‘Do a sweat lodge, tell a medicine man.'”

Bell Rock waited, looking into Sam's eyes, maybe hunting for something. “You ask me for a sweat lodge, I do it as a gift.”

“Ordinarily,” said Blue Horse, “you give a medicine man a horse in return for this ceremony.” Blue Horse's way was always to be a little formal and do things entirely the right way.

“As a gift,” Bell Rock repeated, “I help you with your dream.”

 

B
ELL
R
OCK UNTIED
the thong that held his breechcloth up, and it dropped. He stepped out of the last of his garments, his moccasins. He and Blue Horse looked expectantly at Sam.

“It's ready. Go in, crawl sunwise around the lodge, and sit by the door.” Bell Rock made a clockwise circle with his hand to indicate the way Sam should go.

As Sam slipped out of his hide trousers, a flash of memory hit him. When he had first been naked with a woman, Katherine, now his brother's wife, he had flushed with embarrassment. She laughed at how his pink skin looked against his white hair.

He knew he was flushing now. Off with the shirt, off with the moccasins, stand naked in the February cold. He shivered in one big jerk. It wasn't just the cold, but what was coming—or maybe the fact that he had no idea what was coming. He studied the lodge, which looked a bowl turned upside down. The inside would be low and dark, room only to sit or crouch. And it would be very, very dark.

That feeling lightninged. Once in a while it came up—
I'm living among an alien people. One day will they…?
It always gave him a flicker of panic.

What was really going to happen behind that lodge door? Blackness, chanting, strangeness, maybe a kind of madness. From here he could see the lava rocks in the hole in the center. Some spots glowed faintly red, like a warning. He knew Bell Rock would pour water on them and make steam. He had heard it got really hot.

“Your dream is waiting for you,” said Bell Rock.

Sam sucked in his breath, thought of the buffalo, dipped low, and went.

The lodge was pleasantly warm. He crawled to the spot instructed and sat. Close to the lava rocks, his shins felt half ready to blister.

Bell Rock slipped in and sat on the other side of the door.

Coy yipped, and Sam saw Blue Horse grab him and pull him back. “No dogs in the lodge,” Blue Horse shouted in English. Bell Rock grinned and called out, “Might as well talk to him in Crow—he speaks both the same!” Sam laughed and felt better.

Blue Horse handed in a bucket and dipper.

Sam smiled wryly. The bucket—at least there was something white-man in this place.

“Wet your hair if you want,” said Bell Rock. He dipped his hands in the bucket and slicked his own with the water. Sam followed suit.

“Close the door,” called Bell Rock. Blue Horse did. Bell Rock told him where to tuck it at the bottom. In moments the sweat lodge was as dark a place as Sam could remember. He couldn't see his own knees. “Now I'm throwing cedar on the rocks,” Bell Rock said.

A sharp smell hit Sam's nostrils, pungent but good.

“First I'm going to warm up the lodge.” Sam heard a faint splash of water and then a big
h-i-s-s-s
. Steam ate at his nostrils.

“I'm going to pour four rounds,” said Bell Rock. “Four pours the first round, seven the second, ten the third, and the fourth uncounted.” Sam wasn't sure what he meant by “pours.” Dipperfuls?

“This is your first time. You may get uncomfortable. If you do, put your head down on the ground. It will be cooler there. If you get really uncomfortable, put your nose in the corner, where the lodge cover meets the ground. Try it.”

Sam did. Right there the air was almost cold.

“Now you know you can take care of yourself.”

H-i-s-s-s!
A roar came from the rocks. Steam erupted around Sam's face and chest, almost scalding. He forced himself to stay upright.

Bell Rock began to pray. Sam couldn't remember most of the prayer later. He knew Bell Rock called to each of the four directions and invited them into the lodge.

H-i-s-s-s!
Sam thought,
I don't know if I can stand this.
He told himself he had to stand it. If he embarrassed himself, everyone would hear about it, Meadowlark included. The feeling of being closed in was oppressive, maybe worse than the heat.

Bell Rock asked blessings on various groups of people, the unborn, the young, the mothers, the old—Sam didn't remember all of the ones the medicine man made supplications for.

H-i-s-s-s!
Sam flopped sideways and put his nose to the ground.
I'm not going to make it
.

Later he remembered nothing of what Bell Rock said after this third pour.

When the lodge felt a little less hot, Sam sat up again. He was glad Bell Rock couldn't see him in the darkness.

Finally Bell Rock called out to Blue Horse, “Take the covers off.”

A blazing shaft of light shocked Sam's eyes. After a moment, as the buffalo robes slid off the willow framework and onto the ground, the steam rose to the sky. Cool, delicious air curled into the lodge.

Blue Horse brought water, and Bell Rock and Sam drank, murmuring thank-yous to the powers.

When they had drunk enough—actually, Sam could have sucked down gallons of water—Blue Rock put the robes back on. Little by little, Sam returned in body and mind to the darkness, and the fear.

H-i-s-s-s!
This time Bell Rock spoke a long prayer. In the intense heat, and maybe his worry, Sam's mind failed him. The Crow language suddenly sounded alien to him, and he didn't understand what Bell Rock was saying. He tried to count the number of times the medicine man dipped into the bucket and poured. Somehow by his count there were not seven pours as promised but ten or eleven. By a fierce act of will he kept himself upright until Bell Rock cried out for Blue Horse to remove the covers.

When Sam and the medicine man had cooled off, Blue Horse ceremoniously brought Bell Rock his sacred pipe, filled with tobacco and a plug of sage on top. This pipe wasn't like the ones Sam had seen before. Instead of red, its bowl was of black stone, and carved into the shaggy shape of a buffalo. The stem did not have elaborate decorations, like feathers or brass studs, but was unadorned. Sam was glad it was a buffalo pipe.

Then Bell Rock stunned Sam. He reached into the fire, picked up a red-hot coal with his bare fingers, and without hurry dropped it onto the tobacco in the bowl. He sucked, let a cloud of thick smoke float out, and with one hand brushed it onto his head. Then he lifted the pipe skyward and began to pray:

“I offer this smoke to the east, where things begin.” After each direction he drew on the pipe and blew the smoke out. By turn, going sunwise, he invoked the south, the west, the north.

Again he held the pipe high and touched it to the ground, to one of the lava rocks. “Sun, we make this sweat lodge for you. We seek your great power, to see many things. Great mountains, rivers great and small, I offer you this smoke. Beings above, beings in the ground, I offer you this smoke. Earth, I offer you this smoke, and I offer smoke to the willows. I ask you to let us see the next time when the leaves come out, when they are fully grown, when they turn yellow, and when they fall—may we see each of these seasons again and again for many snows. I ask that wherever we go we may find things to eat that are fat. Wherever we go, may we blacken our faces.” Sam knew that the Crows rubbed charcoal onto their faces to declare victory in battle. “Wherever we go, may the winds blow toward us.” Sam guessed this was so the game would not smell the hunter.

“Today a young man lays before you what he saw in a dream. He cries for your help in understanding it—he cries for your help.”

Now Bell Rock turned the pipe in a full circle and handed it to Sam. “Hold the pipe up,” he said, “then touch it to the earth. When you're ready, cry out for the help of Sun in understanding your dream.”

Sam did exactly as he was told. He raised the pipe to the infinite sky. He touched it to Mother Earth. He didn't know whether he believed in what he was doing, and was even unsure what believing might mean. Then he pointed his arms and the pipe directly to the sky and declared loudly, “Sun, I cry out for your help!” Amazingly, his voice broke.

His mind leapt in and interfered.
At least you're praying to something real,
it said,
the sun is real.

Be quiet,
he told his mind,
and let me do my work.
He threw his head far back now, far enough that the low winter sun struck his face fully, and ran down his chest. He thrust the pipe back over his head. “Sun, I cry out for your help!” His voice broke, but that was no longer amazing.

“Offer the sun some smoke,” Bell Rock said quietly.